Punishment

Meaning

The punishments are three groups of branches that press on one another. Yin, Si and Shen, the Tiger, the Snake and the Monkey, make the punishment without gratitude; Chou, Xu and Wei, the Ox, the Dog and the Goat, the punishment of power; Zi and Mao, the Rat and the Rabbit, the punishment without courtesy. Four more branches, Chen, Wu, You and Hai, punish themselves when they meet themselves, the self-punishment.

The word, xíng, is the old word for a legal penalty, and older books read the punishments severely. The tradition as Ulune reads it sees in them a tension that tests: friction that teaches, lessons learned the long way, and the strength that comes from them. Each group has its lesson in its name. Without gratitude, help that is not returned, or not seen, and the art of giving freely; of power, strength leaning on strength, stubbornness on both sides, and the lesson of yielding in time; without courtesy, closeness that forgets its manners, and the care that good relations ask for.

The groups come from setting each trine beside a seasonal trio, branch by branch. Water’s trine, Shen, Zi and Chen, laid against the spring trio, Yin, Mao and Chen, pairs Shen with Yin, Zi with Mao and Chen with itself; done for all four, it yields the three groups and the four branches left facing themselves.

In practice

• Between a person’s animals: Ulune reads two animals of one punishment as two sides of a life between which pressure can build up, and suggests clear limits and patience to release it.
• Two people: in the Relationship lens, pressure can build between two animals of one punishment, each pushing the other; patience and clear agreements ease it.
• The year ahead: a year whose animal punishes the year animal is the tradition’s punishment of the Tai Sui (刑太歲), read as a year of pressure and of rules to respect, when clear agreements and steady habits serve best; in a month, an easy pace.
• In BaZi a punishment is named by its group when two or three of its branches stand on different pillars, with the group’s own lesson.

Across traditions

• In Western astrology the punishments are squares and oppositions: Zi and Mao a square, 90°; Yin, Si and Shen, like Chou, Xu and Wei, two branches in opposition with the third square to both, the figure called a T-square. Western astrologers read it too as pressure that drives growth.
• Western astrology’s squares are its own aspects of friction and effort, read in modern books as the challenges through which a chart builds its strength: close to the Chinese reading of a punishment as friction that teaches.

Origin and history

Punishment was a cosmic word before it was a relation. In Han cosmology Punishment and Virtue, xíng and dé, were paired forces moving round the year and the compass, as the Huainanzi describes in 139 BC and the silk manuscripts of Mawangdui show in diagrams of their own; the punishments between branches belong to the same vocabulary. Xiao Ji’s Wuxing Dayi, around 600, explains them in a chapter of their own, with their derivation from the trines and the seasonal trios.

The Zi Ping books gave the groups their names, the San Ming Tong Hui among them: the punishment without gratitude, the punishment of power and the punishment without courtesy. The Di Tian Sui and Ren Tieqiao’s commentary read them, like every relation, by the season and the rest of the chart. Many modern readers, Ulune among them, keep the names and set aside the old severity, reading each group as a lesson rather than a penalty.

How Ulune calculates it

The punishments are three fixed groups of branches, Yin, Si and Shen; Chou, Xu and Wei; Zi and Mao. Two different branches of one group make a punishment: the zodiac names it between any two animals, and BaZi between two or three pillars, named by its group. The same self-punishing branch twice is the self-punishment, a relation of its own. Two branches can hold a punishment and other relations at once: Yin and Shen are also a clash, Si and Shen a harmony and a destruction, Yin and Si a harm.

Correspondences